Super sweet Halloween-vibes project to do with younger students, lead to a lot of dead pet stories! Info about it below examples.

We started out by talking about Dios de los Muertos, what it is and how its celebrated. I spend a lot of this time emphasizing how this is a a happy way to remember our loved ones, that it is about good memories, and then I tell them that we’re going to make sugar skull portraits of their (dead) pets.

I love this because it invites the kids to tell stories about their pets in a happy way and it’s super customizable. I demonstrate making a dog or cat shape because most kids will do one of those and they can add on their ears or tails after without help, and it gives me time to help the kids who have tricker animals, like fish. After they draw their animal outlines onto black paper, we cut it out and flip it over before gluing on a colorful background paper.

They get oil pastels and add on the bones, and then black pastels for the faces, They can then add their own designs on the rest of the paper. They end up with super colorful and happy sugar skull pets.